1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to compositions and methods for cropping banana and plantain fruit.
2. Background Art
Global regulatory requirements are becoming more and more demanding with respect to the use of pesticides, particularly with respect to unmanaged or unnecessary pesticide residues. Thus there exist mutually contradictory requirements of farmers in that the need to control destructive pests very thoroughly demands that more pesticide be used, while increasing pressures from regulatory agencies demand that less pesticide be used. These regulatory demands are aimed to protect the safety and health of agricultural workers and the general public. It is also well-known that the general public would like less chemical residue on fruits and vegetables.
A particular consequence of this situation is that there is an increasing need to have more efficient methods of protection of banana trees and plantain trees. It is well-known that such fruit-producing trees attract a large number of pests, particularly destructive insects and nematodes.
A common technique for cultivating banana trees or plantain trees is by growing them on large blocks or plantations. The trees are disposed as mother plants having a series (for example 1 to 5, generally 1 to 3) of followers or peeps, that is, daughter plants, growing from the corm (that is, the base of the pseudostem) of the mother plant. In this respect, the mother and daughter plants share a common root system. At an appropriate time before the harvest of the fruit of the mother plants or trees, all the daughter plants are removed except one per mother plant which is deemed by the grower to have the best chance of survival. Such a practice allows the next generation of banana or plantain plants to be readily produced. The removal of the daughter plants is possible after the harvest of the mother plants, but it is agronomically preferred to remove them beforehand.
The fruits of the banana trees are harvested by cutting off the bunches of fruit. Afterwards, the mother trees are cut to remove the canopies. The pseudotrunks which are left are generally in a height range from 0.5 meter to 2.5 meters. Such a practice facilitates the growth of the daughter plants. The mother pseudotrunk is then left to decay or is cut down in stages until only a daughter pseudotrunk remains.
British Patent Publications GB 2 304 575 and GB 2 304 708 generally describe methods which aim to meet these needs. It is also known from the former publication that a pesticide may be combined with a plant growth regulator to treat banana and plantain trees. Nonetheless, it remains a non-trivial problem in agronomy to apply the correct amount of a plant growth regulator at the correct time in the life cycle of a banana or plantain plant. The present invention provides a general method which offers improvements on the state of the art.
Sometimes it is necessary to arrest the growth of the mother plant when it is judged that the mother plant will not produce a commercially acceptable bunch of fruit. It is also desirable to arrest the growth of the mother plant in order to schedule the harvest of the subsequent daughter plant.
One way to arrest the growth of the mother plant is to cut the pseudotrunk and allow the daughter to grow. This method is commonly called in Spanish "vampiero", which in English means "suckering". When the mother plant is cut, the daughter plant "sucks" or absorbs nutrients from the mother plant and the mother plant dies back to the corm.
It is known that such suckering may be accomplished by the injection of ethephon (chloroethylphosphonic acid) into the mother plant. Such an injection causes loss of apical dominance in the mother plant and allows the mother to die gradually back to the corm. However, an undesired drawback to this type of chemical suckering is that the daughter plant often develops very undesirable foliage, known as "cabbaging". This is to say that the daughter plant foliage is highly bunched and generally cannot develop properly to produce acceptable fruit.